


the way the world ends

by ruinsrebuilt



Series: the hollow men [3]
Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Angst, Canon Era, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Major Character Injury, Out of Body Experiences, POV Alternating, Rare Pairings, points - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-04
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-11-09 00:19:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11092962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruinsrebuilt/pseuds/ruinsrebuilt
Summary: His hand shook, though not with rage. Not even with fear.It shook because he was at war within himself — the desire to pull the trigger being sieged by one lone thought, rattling deep in his bones, screaming at him to stop, to listen.Grant.





	the way the world ends

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the final installment of The Hollow Men! I'm sorry this has been so long in the works, I had some real trouble finding a way to tell this story the way it needed to be told. I wrote it from Ron's POV, and it didn't feel right. I wrote it from Grant's and that didn't feel right either. Then, after a chat with my dear friend and personal yoda, Maddie, I decided to try putting them together. 
> 
> I hope you like it. 
> 
>  
> 
> This is the way the world ends.  
> This is the way the world ends.  
> This is the way the world ends.  
> Not with a bang but a whimper. 
> 
> \- The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot

Austria was a balm of sunshine and clean air. Every breath felt like the first, filling aching lungs with crisp relief. The entire company was dusting off smiles they hadn’t worn since Toccoa. 

Ron liked to observe them when they stopped to rest, sprawling in the sun and cracking wise, swapping Lucky Strikes like it was the easiest thing in the world. Like they hadn’t all bled for the right to be there. It was easy to pretend to forget; none of them ever really could, but they all understood the need to give unspoken wounds time to heal, so they carried on like they were the lightest men in Europe.

Grant was holding up well. He sauntered between the clumps of men, passing out cigarettes and pats on the back. The men all looked lighter after Grant spoke to them, and Ron found himself wondering what Grant was saying.

He’d ask him later. 

 

+

 

Grant loved Austria. 

Not because there wasn’t any fighting, though that played a part in it — but because Austria was the first place they had time to spend holed up together in Ron’s quarters, sleeping the day away, or simply existing together. There were no runners pounding on the door, no mortars exploding in the distance, just a breeze stirring thin curtains, and peace. 

For the first time since that jump into Normandy, Grant didn’t feel the need to be on guard. He felt safe. 

Having a sleeping Ron beside him was quickly becoming one of his favorite things in the world. It was still so new, so special. The novelty of being this vulnerable with someone, and to see someone being just as vulnerable with him, hadn’t worn off. He didn’t think it ever would. 

Until this moment Grant hadn’t even dared to consider the future — what life beyond the war might mean for Ron and him. Not when they’d spent most of their days running straight towards death. But there in the stillness he allowed himself to imagine waking up next to Ron every morning. He imagined coffee shared over the morning paper, and dogs, and kids, and kisses on the cheek before heading off to peaceful jobs. 

Never touching a weapon again.

Nothing had ever sounded so appealing, and knowing it was within his reach was nearly more than Grant’s already-full heart could bear. 

But did Ron feel the same? They’d never spoken of it, not with this thing between them still so new and so tied to their hellish circumstances. 

What did Ron want after the war? Where would the end of the war leave them?  
Grant glanced over at Ron, dozing next to him, and considering waking him to find out. He reached out a hand but brought it back. 

He’d ask him later.

 

+

 

Sometimes later doesn’t go as planned. 

 

+

 

That night there was something in the air. Something Grant couldn’t name. When the replacements on duty with him asked what was wrong, he struggled to find the words and merely shook his head, trying to shrug the feeling to the back of his mind.

But the moment he saw the jeep idling in the road on the way back to base, men-shaped lumps scattered around it, he knew. 

It was death. 

At first everything moved fast. 

His heart was roaring inside of him, beating in time with the replacement’s drunken laughter. His chance to stop him was quickly vanishing, careening away from him towards the jeep, and ultimately, more death. 

Then the world slowed. 

Grant heard himself shout, saw the replacement whirl, eyes glazed, the gun shaking in his grip. He knew what was about to happen, but he was frozen in slow motion. The trigger met the back of the trigger guard and the world exploded. 

 

\+ 

 

The quiet of Ron’s quarters was shattered when Talbert burst through the door, pale and wrung out, the words jolting out of him in disjointed horror. 

Grant. Hospital. Shot.

No one had ever seen Ron sprint faster than he did that night; not at Brecourt, not across Foy, not even when he was running through the muddy streets of Haguenau on his way to a damp and mourning basement. 

 

+

 

It didn’t go dark like Grant expected. He felt himself falling, felt himself slipping away, but it wasn’t into oblivion. Somehow he was slipping out of himself. 

Then he was watching himself fall. 

He heard his men yell, saw them running toward him — but somehow it wasn’t him. He was yards away, watching the gruesome act play out in real time. 

_What was happening? Why was he there? Why wasn’t he gone?_

Dimly he was aware of a faint pain in his head, there, but very far away. It was nothing compared to the pain he felt in his chest. This pain was searing, white hot, easing only slightly with each step toward his body, as if he were fighting gravity to be outside of it. 

He was helpless as the replacements struggled to lift his body into the jeep, the two of them barely more than kids, their pale faces lined with fear for their sergeant. 

 

+

 

The operating theatre was large and dimly lit. Roe was already there, the furrow in his brow deeper than Ron had ever seen it. There was no doctor in the room. 

All this Ron noticed in the second before his vision tunneled, seeing nothing but Grant lying on the table, the harsh spotlight illuminating a hasty bandage tied around his head. Even from across the room, Ron could see bright red stains blossoming around Grant’s temple. 

Ron didn’t remember moving but suddenly his hips were bumping the edge of the table, and Grant’s hand was in his own. 

Grant’s breathing was shallow and erratic. His hands were clammy. He didn’t respond when Ron whispered his name.

Never before had he thought of Grant as small, but there on that table he looked like a child. Ron was reminded of the children they had seen as they battled across Europe, what tiny but still enormous casualties they were in this bloody affair. The comparison chilled him to his core.

He bent so that his lips rested close to Grant’s ear, cringing when the coppery scent of blood reached his nostrils, but not moving away. He whispered what he should have said the night Grant found him alone in the CP, when it was clear he felt the same. Or when they knew the chances of Grant dying on that patrol were high and Ron was holding onto him like a lifeline. Or during those many quiet nights of secretly shared beds or cots or floors, kissing the ghosts away. 

He whispered things that he hadn’t the courage to tell Grant before now; things that he desperately wished Grant knew as he fought for his life. He whispered of lazy evenings, thousands of them, spent curled together on their very own bed. Of dogs, and children, and a garden. Home. He made promises he knew he would give up everything to keep. 

He remembered Grant saying once that a promise from Ron was as good as done. If Grant could hear him now, he knew what Ron was promising. 

He pressed a kiss to the back of Grant’s hand and looked up at Roe and Talbert, who had looked politely away as soon as it occurred to them that this was more than just a captain and his sergeant. Ron hardly spared a thought to the fact that he had let a carefully guarded secret slip in such a blatant way. He knew he could trust his men. Especially where Grant was concerned. 

 

+

 

Ron was trembling. Grant could see it, the tremor in his hands as he clutched Grant’s own. He looked down at Grant’s body, watching his shallow, labored breathing, and he trembled like a child. 

Grant tried to reach him. He was right there, right next to him. So close he could reach out and touch him. Except he couldn’t. He was dying, and so was Ron, and there was no sound but inside he was _screaming, screaming, screaming._

The look in Ron’s eyes when he first entered the operating room had threatened to crush Grant from the inside out. He had seen that look before, in a basement filled with death and mourning, in that awful moment before Ron knew who was on the stretcher, knew it wasn’t Grant, and was filled with shameful relief. 

And now here they were. Grant laid out on a cold table, waiting for what could only be bad news. 

It would have been easier if he wasn’t awake. The gravitational pull towards his body, the instinct to give in and let it take him, was nearly unbearable. It would be so easy to lay down and let oblivion quietly whisk him away. 

Except it wasn’t that easy. Not while Ron was living every moment of this hellish nightmare, alone. If Grant gave up, Ron would spend the rest of his life reliving this night, and Grant refused to abandon him to such a fate. 

No. If the world must end, it must end with both of them firmly in it. 

 

+

 

Roe started when Ron rasped, “Where is the doctor?” 

“I dunno, sir. We sent a runner but he shoulda been here by now.” 

Roe was holding a glass pint of blood in his hands, and in the dimly lit room Ron thought it looked startlingly black. He would remember this later, and think how odd a thing it was for him to notice. 

Then the doctor was there, sliding through the doors like a snake. His eyes were bloodshot and he lit a cigarette with body language that said he was less than thrilled to be there. 

Ron hated him immediately. 

“He’s not gonna make it.” 

The words were a knife to his gut, and he rubbed Grant’s hand, willing him to not listen to this man, who obviously knew nothing — not of them, not of their situation. 

Roe was confused, distraught. “You can’t operate on him?” 

The doctor scoffed. “Not me. You’d need a brain surgeon, and even if you had one, I don’t think there’s any hope.” 

He walked away, cigarette in hand. 

They stood in stunned silence.

Ron’s mind was whirling, his world spinning out of control, steadily coming to an end with every second that passed. 

This was unacceptable. Grant would not die here. Not here, not when the war was all but over. Ron refused to let this goddamned war take one more good thing from the world. 

He turned to Tab. “You find the shooter. I want him alive.” 

Tab nodded, already in motion. “What are you gonna do?” 

“We’re gonna find us a brain surgeon.”

 

+

 

Ron wasn’t allowed in the operating room. Roe had barely been able to keep him from ripping the face off the clerk who snidely informed him he wouldn’t be allowed to continue to hold Grant’s hand when they took him back to pre-op. 

He paced outside the operating room, the ticking of the clock painfully loud in the empty corridor. His heart felt like it was rolling in his chest, which had been emptied the moment Tab had spoken those hideous words. 

A runner came to tell him they had found the replacement, but Ron could barely bring himself to acknowledge the man's words. Not when the light from the small window in the operating room was playing on his trembling hands. Not when yards away his world could end with one wrong twist of a scalpel. 

Ron had thought himself invincible. The war hadn’t reached him, not deep down where he lived within himself. He’d been through hell and back again, dodging bullets and mortars along the way. He was respected, feared, untouchable -- until the war found the sole chink in his armor, and launched a well-aimed bullet. 

 

+

 

It had been hours. The light from the small window in the operating room door was shining dimly on Ron’s hands, nestled in his pitch-black hair. The weeping had stopped, but in its place it left raw, shuddering gasps. Heaving. Agonized. 

Grant had given up trying to reach him. Nothing he said, nothing he did, could breach the invisible barrier between them. He felt as if he were in a vacuum. Touching without feeling. Screaming without making a sound.

It was nerve-wracking, this. Waiting on word of their fate. 

The pain Grant felt at being separated from his body was getting worse, making it hard to concentrate on Ron, but if he tried, if he really tried, he could feel the anguish rippling off him. 

There were so many regrets -- not regrets of what was between them, never, _never_ that. But regrets about where they’d drawn that invisible line between what was spoken, and what was left unsaid. 

In hindsight it was easy now, to see that nothing could be as terrifying or painful as never getting to say the words. Not rejection, not discovery, not ridicule. 

All those daydreams about a home and a life with Ron after the war were quickly disappearing. He thought they’d have time. To talk, to love, to _live_.

As far as Grant was concerned, a bullet to the head was far less painful than being forced to watch his soulmate weep in a darkened hospital hallway, alone. Despite everything they had been through, Grant knew this was the first time the war had truly reached Ron. He’d had always been able to live deep within himself, untouched by the horrors he’d witnessed, horrors that would drive any man to the breaking point. It was how he’d managed to stay strong, to lift Easy from the depths and carry them through from Bastogne to Austria. 

But Grant had been his rock. They had drawn strength from each other and now, where was their strength? 

Grant shuddered. He’d sworn to himself that if there was one promise he would keep in his lifetime of broken promises, it was that he would be there for Ron, _always_. 

His captain was broken in a way that couldn’t be mended. The crack in his spirit, the one he hid so well, was there to stay, but, somehow, Grant had filled that crack. Somehow he’d managed to nestle his way into Ron’s life and make a home there, lending him strength and love and purpose along the way. 

Now he was being ripped out of Ron, just as he’d been ripped out of his own body, and he was left floating, helpless. His place in the universe just out of reach. 

 

+

 

The operating room doors swished open, drenching Ron in harsh light. He launched from where he'd slid down to collapse against the wall, his view into the room blocked by the surgeon slumped in the doorway.

“He is going to make it.” 

Ron’s knees threatened to send him spilling onto the cold floor. Grant would live.

The doctor finished briefing him on Grant’s condition and extended recovery, but Ron was barely listening because _Grant would live_. He was left standing alone in a darkened hallway, finally able to breathe again. 

Then the rage hit. 

 

+

 

When the surgeon finally came to tell Ron the news that he would live, Grant expected Ron to rush to his side. But something was wrong. 

He watched as Ron’s eyes settled on the blood — his blood — spattered across the floor, and saw them fill with something like rage but — it was different than the sort of rage Grant was used to seeing in battle. It wasn’t the heated sort of rage that flares up quickly and then burns itself out. No. This rage was ice cold, calm, and calculating. 

Deadly.

 

+

 

The man who'd shot Grant was a bloody mess.

Ron couldn’t tell who had done the actual beating. He was surrounded by Easy men, their rage nearly tangible as it pulsed through the muggy room. Ron had a feeling they’d all played a part in desecrating the man’s face. 

When Ron’s pistol slammed across his face, the resounding _crack_ was enough to make most of the men flinch away but Ron barely registered that he’d broken the man’s jaw. 

His gun was inches away from the coward’s face. 

It would be so easy. The revenge would be worth any punishment that came after; Ron would face a thousand court martials, a firing squad if that’s what it came to, if only to wipe the smug look off the bastard’s bloodied face. 

The image of Grant bleeding out on that table was branded in his vision.

 

+

 

The room stank of violence. 

The replacement looked like he’d been beaten by every seething man surrounding him. And yet he still managed to cough up a laugh, along with the blood. 

Grant stood beside Liebgott and begged him to stop this. This wasn’t the way. When he saw Joe wince he thought maybe he’d heard. Maybe, somehow, he’d reached him. 

That's when he registered the ugly crack echoing through the room — the sound of the replacement’s jaw breaking. 

Grant whirled as Ron aimed his weapon between the replacement’s eyes with a blood-covered, trembling hand. A small part of Grant wanted to give up. To step back and let Ron end the replacement’s spiteful existence. Why shouldn’t they have some justice for once? Didn’t the world owe them that much?

But Grant thought about what that would mean for Ron.

He would never be allowed to stay in command of Easy if he shot an unarmed soldier. Not when it was peacetime, not when military diligence and order were being strictly enforced now that the fighting had stopped. He would be stripped of his command and court-martialed. Maybe even shot. 

The thought of Ron facing a firing squad was enough to pull an anguished cry from Grant. Before he realized what he was doing he was stumbling blindly to his knees in front of Ron, kneeling between him and the replacement, the gun now aimed directly at him. 

Maybe Ron couldn’t hear him, maybe he was too far gone. Grant didn’t care. He begged his captain to put down the weapon, to let it go. Tears were running down his cheeks, knowing Ron couldn't hear him, that the barrier between them could still mean the end. Still, he kept talking. 

 

_Please. Don’t let them take you away._

_I need you._

 

It was a confession long overdue. He needed Ron more than he’d ever needed anybody. 

 

_I need you, and you can’t leave me. Not when I fought so hard to stay._

 

He rested his forehand against the muzzle of Ron’s gun. 

 

+

 

His hand shook, though not with rage. Not even with fear. 

It shook because he was at war within himself — the desire to pull the trigger being sieged by one lone thought, rattling deep in his bones, screaming at him to stop, to listen. 

Grant.

He knew what Grant would say. Grant would tell him to stop. To put the gun down. To let law and regulation sort out the replacement’s fate. Ron could almost see him, standing in front of the replacement, hands out, pleading for him to stop this.

But Ron wasn’t ready. He wasn’t ready to let go of his rage, to live with the idea that the man who’d done this to them would walk away. 

 

+

 

The muzzle trembled against his forehead for what seemed an eternity. Grant waited. He could see the war inside Ron, written in his eyes and trembling hand. He saw something in Ron’s eyes open, and for one brilliant moment Grant could see the man he knew beneath the facade, frightened and unsure, and he thought maybe, just maybe, Ron could see him too. Then those eyes closed off again, and Grant knew he’d just imagined it. 

But the hand holding the gun dropped. 

 

+

 

He’d wanted so badly to pull that trigger. To end it all. 

But he’d made a promise. 

 

+

 

“Let the MPs deal with this piece of shit.” Ron’s words were harsh, but now that the rage was gone he simply sounded exhausted. 

Grant sagged with relief, the tightness in his chest easing slightly. Instinctively, he reached toward Ron, but suddenly everything was tilted and he couldn't quite reach, and the world felt like it was swaying and fading, shades of black curling around the edges of his vision. His body felt heavy, weighed down by a crushing force. 

He heard Ron’s voice but didn’t understand. 

He was falling again. 

 

+

 

The days that followed Grant’s surgery were treated with caution. The surgeon assured Ron that Grant would live, but could not guarantee he would not be paralyzed, or even that he would be able to communicate.

Ron was like a ghost tethered to Grant’s existence, always hovering. He refused to leave for any longer than it took to fulfill his duties as captain, and he was always either in Grant’s room or on his way there. The men came in shifts to visit, telling him how much he was missed, and how he’d better wake up soon. 

Ron didn’t beg Grant to come back, even though the urge came from somewhere deep in his gut. He didn’t pressure him to hurry back from wherever it was he had gone to heal. He told him to come back when he was ready; that he would be there. He reminded him, over and over, of his promise of a home.

 

+

 

The first thing Grant noticed was the light. Even beneath his lidded eyes, the light was blinding. His brain felt murky, foggy. Vaguely he wondered if he’d died after all. 

The second thing he noticed was the hand clutching his own, and the fact that it felt a lot like Ron’s. He’d know Ron’s touch anywhere. Even in the afterlife. 

His last conscious thought before he drifted away again, was that it didn’t matter where he was — heaven, hell, Austria, or nowhere at all — as long as Ron’s hand was in his, he was home.

**Author's Note:**

> Special thank you's to: 
> 
> Rachel, for betaing, and also for introducing me to my man t.s. in the first place. 
> 
> Niamh, for all the encouragement and input along the way. 
> 
> Maddie, for letting me cry about how everything was falling apart (it wasn't) and for helping me find a fresh perspective. 
> 
> You're all absolutely brilliant. <3


End file.
